Midlife Women Need Realistic Self Care, Not More Pressure

You don't need another perfect routine. You need self-care that works in your day-to-day life. Welcome to Beyond Diagnosis. I'm Rita De Michele. This podcast is for people looking beyond symptoms and searching for answers through expert conversations and real-life stories. We explore the connection between health, lifestyle, and whole-person support. Brought to you by the Beyond Diagnosis Collective, your connection to trusted holistic practitioners. If you're a smart, capable midlife woman who knows what to do for her health but still struggles to stay consistent, this conversation is for you. I'm joined by Cara Michelle Nether, a midlife consistency consultant and founder of Strength and Vitality Wellness. For more than 20 years, she has helped midlife women build sustainable health routines that fit real life, not perfect circumstances. Welcome, Cara Michelle. It's so good to have you on once again.

I'm so excited to be here with you, Rita. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

You're welcome. And you know, we're having a little chat before. Women and self-care, it's such a big topic. It's such a, you know, something that not all of us, but a lot of us really struggle. You know, I do, to be able to put ourselves first. Why do so many women know what to do for their health especially, and their life, but still find it so hard to keep doing it or keep going?

Oh, I mean, Rita, the, the real simple answer here is No one's ever taught us how to take care of ourselves and all the important people and projects that we have going on in our lives. There's never been a course. I've never taken anything. I'm sure that you haven't either, where someone just sat you down and said, you know, this is how you prioritize your health. Remember, all of your mental and physical energy is what you need in order to be able to give. So intellectually, we know that that is the answer, but how to actually make that happen? How do you put that in practice every day? It's, you know, we're just grabbing information from every source that we can, trying to build some kind of system for ourselves on the fly.

I liken it a little bit to like parenthood, isn't it? You have a baby, there's no manual, no one really tells you what to do, especially if you don't have family around. So it is kind of like you're learning on the fly, the same thing. And it is true, especially as women, when no one sits us down and goes, do you know what, you actually do come first. Like, you know, people say, oh, you have to fill your own cup or put your own mask on like you do in the airplane. You have to put— but no one does that because no one's sure how. It goes beyond the bubble bath. It goes beyond the scented candle and maybe, you know, an affirmation. It goes deeper than that. If it's not that, and if it's not about a lack of discipline, you know, what is actually really going on?

You know, first, I always like to start off helping women to remember That what we're talking about here is having high levels of mental and physical energy.

Mm-hmm.

Because in the, in, in the end, that's really what's often missing. You know, we have a lot of folks that are counting on us. We have projects that we're trying to move forward. We have careers, we have older relatives that need support. We still have children that need help. You know, all of that is great, but what, what, what often is missing is the un— what's underneath all of that. And that's being able to show up And be a good listener. We wanna show up and be able to think outside the box if somebody's asking for advice or we're working on a project with coworkers, right? So we need strong mental and physical energy. So that's really often what people are looking for. But somehow we— that gets lost in the conversation about self-care. We focus more on the activities like drinking more water or getting more sleep. And those are certainly things we need to do because they actually generate energy. But I think it's nice sometimes to just back up and look at the foundation, the actual bottom line, the kind of the drop-the-mic part. You know, it's really mental and physical energy that we need, that we're looking for.

That is so interesting because if someone, if someone comes to you and they say, I just don't have the energy for this. So what are the— so if that's the foundation, what are they actually saying to you? That they don't physically have the energy? They don't have the capacity? They don't have the willingness or no longer the drive? What, what is it that they're saying to you?

It could be all of those things depending on the individual. But I tell you what often shows up is that women are actually saying, I don't have the capacity. I think you hit the nail on the head there, Rita. I think that often— so, so really the issue is that I can't go and show up the way that I truly want to for this person or this project. And that's often a capacity issue. I can't have the mental and physical energy that I need in order to deal with elderly parents or getting dinner on the table or my spouse or my partner after a long day. That's a capacity issue. I feel like I'm starting off the day pretty good, but by lunchtime, my brain is not working anymore and my body just— all I want to do is go home and get under the covers, right? So that's often a capacity issue. So I think that's really the issue there. We really— there's a lot of things going on. We want to to be involved. We want to be helpful, but we just run out of juice.

To me, that's sounding like when someone starts going into burnout.

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. If you're— if it's kind of like, you know, riding in a car that needs new brakes, right? You can start to, you know, you get down to the, to the metal there, you start to smell the smoke, or we don't have enough oil in the car, right? We just— and that's the piece that I, that I also wanted to add here is that the person who's kind of holding the ball for family, friends, work, all of that, We don't have the ability or the space to just drop everything. So we keep moving anyway.

Right.

You know, even though we're feeling burnt out, even though we don't feel like we have the juice to kind of keep moving forward, we end up doing— getting everything done anyway. And I think that that's a concern for 2 reasons. One is that physically and mentally for that person, for that woman, we're just setting ourselves up for more health issues later on. Right. We just be clear about that. And secondly, the people that we're trying to support, they get a subpar version of us.

Well, that's a good point.

Yeah. So, so they get, you know, the part of us that just kind of gets through the conversation or gets through the thing. It's good enough, but not the person that we truly want to be. You know, I think that sometimes we think that willpower is the real issue. But I think if we just remember that patience is an energy. Thoughtfulness requires energy. Thinking outside of the box and being playful, those are— they require energies. I'm just— I just call those energies. You know, oftentimes if we're entering into an important conversation or a critical part of a project and we're going in with low levels of energy, we often have to come back later on and kind of clean things up a little bit, right? Because The conversation didn't— I didn't really get a chance to say what I wanted to say, or I didn't offer, you know, the next piece of the puzzle for the project the way I really wanted to. So we actually end up making a little bit more work for ourselves.

Do you find that that capacity and bordering on to burnout, especially in midlife, is because we want to start and we realize we have to start looking after ourselves, but we keep going back to the same habits, patterns, and the things that we did when we were younger? It's almost like we're don't want to let go of the past and we don't want to accept where we are now. And that would use a lot of energy, wouldn't it?

Absolutely. You know, one of the things that, that, that we just have to face is, you know, as we're entering into midlife, you know, and I'm, you know, that's a term, an umbrella term that, you know, lots of folks might consider themselves there or not consider themselves there. When you start to go into menopause, when you start to have that conversation, That's kind of what I mean when I think about midlife. But, you know, a lot of body— a lot of things change in midlife, right? You know, our environments change, you know, our status at home with either having children in the house or not having kids in the house, or, you know, our desires for work. Maybe we're adding on a new career or we're backing down out of one. But the big ticket item is menopause. It's like you got a totally new body and brain.

Oh, yeah.

You have to figure out what to do, how to— like, What do we do with this, right? Why is this happening? Women come in all the time talking about brain fog and hot flashes and not being able to sleep, heart palpitations, aches in their joints. All kinds of things are going on. So it's a very big change. And if we continue, if we had a good rhythm, self-care rhythm in the past, and that's a big if, right? If we had a good self-care rhythm in the past, it just doesn't work now at this stage. And so, but at the same time, again, no one is showing us exactly what it is we need to do with this new body. How do we understand it? So we end up using patterns from the past and getting frustrated that they just don't work as well as we want them to.

So before we go any further, let's, let's just touch back. So now we've, we've learned about, you know, we haven't got the, the systems in place, we haven't got the patterns, we haven't got the neural pathways of self-care from the past, and we're starting to get burnt out. In terms of capacity, How? Well, I think there's acceptance. Acceptance of where we are now as a midlife would take a lot of stress, emotional stress and mental stress off us if we would let go of what we used to do, what you were just saying. But how do you help people build the capacity to be where they are now, accept it, and what do you actually do with them?

Yeah, thanks for asking. You know, I think that this is a really important piece here. We don't, we shouldn't skip over this. Because I think that explaining the mechanisms that are going on in our bodies or that, that drop in estrogen and progesterone is super important, like explaining the fact that every cell in our body has receptors for, for that estradiol. And when those, those levels drop, that's why we're having so many different symptoms, because every aspect of our body is looking for— that's, that's the type of estrogen that we have relied on for muscle tone and memory and All of the aspects that helped us to feel young and capable. So those levels drop. It doesn't mean we can't have that kind of feeling. We can't feel capable and be able to take care of things. We just have to go at it in a different way. And so oftentimes just slowing down and talking about what's the physiological processes that are actually going on is super helpful for women to understand, oh, you mean I'm not losing my mind? It's just that my body is really changing. And I can, I can, I can have the life that I truly want to have. I can have the body that I want to have. I just have to go about it in a different pattern.

So what do you do with women? How do you start with a woman who's, who's like that, who's in this stage? How would you start? Just so our listeners and viewers can get a bit of an idea. Okay, I'm recognizing what you're saying, but what does that mean for me?

Well, first of all, I think that it's super important to find a practitioner who actually works with women in this age group and find information that's very specific to us. Not all information that's out there, actually very little of information that's out there is actually meant for women in this age group. So it's really easy to find exercise routines that are actually meant for younger people and then get caught up in that and end up injuring ourselves. So we really, that's the first piece. You want to find somebody who's actually talking to the person talking to you, the person that is going through menopause, that has this, that's in this age range, someone who's still working, somebody still has a lot of responsibilities, because then you're actually going to get information that's actually useful for you. And then I think that it's also really useful to help women understand that this is not their fault. The fact that they're not able to figure out the right routines or not able to be as consistent as they want to be, not able to find how to put all the pieces together so that they can get, uh, the, the practices in throughout the day that they know they need for themselves. I, I really want to help women understand that this, again, this is not your fault, that we just haven't been shown how to do this. And a lot of— there hasn't been very, you know, really truthfully, the, the amount of research that's been done on women's health is, is very small. I think it's— that's starting to pick up a little bit.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's kind of picking up from almost zero. So So there's just— so it's just really easy to get confused. Everybody's talking with a lot of confidence. Yes, this is for you, this is for you. But when you really dig in, they're talking to a younger audience group. So, um, so it's not any— it's not— it's really easy to, to point the finger back at ourselves. It's really easy to be down on ourselves. It's really easy to have a lot of negative conversation and want to give up on yourself. We just have to accept that the information just hasn't been there, and it's been A little confusing. Find a practitioner who's really very helpful with folks in this category of life right now, this stage of life right now. One of the structures that I found to be really helpful is to show women how to actually create consistency around the practices that actually generate mental and physical energy. Again, not only are we not being shown how to take care of ourselves or what it is we to do at this stage of life. No one is showing us what is the actual structure that we need in order to create a rhythm of consistency with the practices that we know we need, that we want to put into, into our everyday experiences while we're taking care of all of these responsibilities. You see, life just doesn't stop just because we want to do more for ourselves.

That's a really interesting point. How you said self-care, you know, you need this structure. Now, no, I would never have thought of self-care needs a structure. Like, I would think, you know, your day needs a structure, your work has these structures in it to follow through to finish something. Even cooking a meal kind of has a structure, doesn't it? You have to read the recipe, get the ingredients, take the next step. I would never have thought about that for self-care. Self-care is just like something that pops into my head. Like, you know, my feet hurt, I might put them in some probably hot water or whatever it is, or I feel like a massage, that just spur of the moment. Can you give us a little hint of what is this structure that you're talking about that we need for self-care? And what do you teach people to start putting in a structure for it?

So I call this, this the midlife consistency framework. This is, this is the framework that's needed in order to find a level of consistency with the practices that actually generate mental and physical And I like to emphasize that, Rita, because there's, again, there's a lot of information out there. And, you know, just because we found some— something that seems interesting, that doesn't mean that that's the thing that is actually going to give us more mental and physical energy. So we really want to be thoughtful about that, right? There's only so much time in the day. And so we really want to be thoughtful about where we're actually putting our time. What are we allowing into our our self-care routines. So here's the framework. So the first piece, I like to think about this like a pyramid. And the base of the pyramid is that we need to anchor your vision. We need to anchor your vision. So what I mean here is that if we don't have a clear understanding of what it is that we're trying to create in our life, what life do we want to live? How do we want to show up? What impact do we want to have? Then when we're trying to shift our diet a little bit or get a little more exercise in, it can, it can kind of show up like it's a checklist kind of, kind of thing. Having a clear sense, you know, I really wanted— I have a client who said, I really want to be able to go and hit all the national parks in the United States and climb the highest peaks There. You can see that if that's a clear vision that she has for herself now and in the future, it gives her exercise and her nutrition and her sleep purpose. So she's not just doing it because she saw it on a video or she read it in a magazine. She's doing it because she's eating a little bit better. She's getting better sleep because she knows that that's going to give her the mental and physical energy she needs to plan those trips and climb those mountains. So having taken the time to clarify who am I trying to be, who do I want to be now, who do I want to be 20 years from now, how do I want to show up, what impact do I want to have with the family and friends and coworkers that I engage with, gives the activity of self-care purpose.

That is incredible. I've never heard it explained that way, and it makes sense. That's why all these other things that you just dip your toe in, or like you said, you saw in a magazine, online, social media, just drop off because they're just like up in the sky and you've grabbed one of them and then you think, oh, I'll try that one for me. What I'm hearing when you were talking, you ground it. You like— you're talking about grounding it And it seems like if you ground it to something within your value system, I hear value system when you're talking. Like, that's a step even before grounding it in something. You have to actually know what your value system is and what is it that you are going for and why something resonates will stick and why something else will just float away.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Think about it. Like, we're, we're just constantly running, hopping from one person to another, this place, that place. And it's very common to sit down with women in their late 40s and 50s and early 60s and ask them, when was the last time you actually thought about, you know, what are you doing in your life? Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to create for yourself and your family and your friends? Like, people haven't done that in years. So that means to me that it's really easy for us to just get up and follow the routine. And just kind of keep that cycle going, but not really being clear on what's really going to help me have the life that I truly want to have for myself. There, you can have a life and you're moving through. We all have lives, but are we really excited about it? Does our life actually articulate and demonstrate who we truly feel we are in our hearts?

Mm.

How do we want to show up in the world? Does our life actually demonstrate that. Not that we don't want to, it's just that we haven't taken the time to get clear about it.

And, you know, I think when, when you are sleep deprived, super busy with young family, or family of any age, really, or you care for older parents, it is really hard to stop and think, how do I get in touch with myself to find out who I am? Like, what do I do? It's like, I know, sometimes I sit there and I think, that's what I need to do. I really need to get in touch with What's in my heart, in my soul? What are my values? And I sit down and I go to think about it and my mind goes off to something else. But I also find it quite challenging to think, yeah, well, what is that? What, what, how do I get in touch with that? So when someone's so stressed and busy, is there a technique that you use that help them to recognize and start getting in touch? Because stress and, uh, unregulated nervous system. It's very hard to get into that state.

You know, I think that it is a process when we're trying to tap into ourselves and listen to our hearts. You know, you have to have a quieter environment. You have to take a few minutes for yourself. But it doesn't have to be a 4-hour-a-day type thing, right? And I think that's the vision. You know, when we say, oh, you want to create your— get your vision together for yourself, everybody thinks that they're sitting You know, a lotus position, you know, at a retreat, which is a really wonderful thing to do if you can. And if you make a little space for yourself a couple times a week, maybe 15 minutes to just start thinking about it, that sits in your subconscious as you move on through the day. When you get a chance to come back again, you'll, you'll have more answers about who I am and, and how I want to show up and what's important to me now in my life. Versus maybe in my 20s. So I think that's the key is just to make a little bit of space for yourself. I offer, I have coursework and I sit down with clients and we work through that, but it's really just having some space designed for some quiet time so that you can do a little bit of reflecting. And I also really encourage clients to not take it too seriously, right? Like we want to make it perfect. You know, all my clients are go-getters, right? You know, you were just We're running companies and doing all kinds of amazing things, uh, in the workplace and with our families. Um, but this is not that kind of work, right? You, you want to give yourself space to just pour all the possibilities out there over time, and then you'd be able to— then you can go back and sift through and see which ones are really important to you.

You see a lot of women, and each person comes to you individual, and your program and the way you treat them would be individualized. So I'm not sure if this— you can answer this, but I'm really curious to know, is there a common deeper driver or emotional pattern that you see coming up regularly for women that stops them from being able to do this self-care? Because it's, you know, it's the old mind-body, then our behaviors are formed from what we're thinking. Do you see there's a deeper drive? Is it a self-worth Or is it just a lack of time? Or what's— have you noticed something behind it?

Many women, it's really easy to feel like you're just not enough, that you— that how you're showing up, how you're taking care of your family, you know, it's so easy these days to see her, um, examples of how people are taking care of their families. And, uh, you know, we see the photographs that, that come in the mail for everybody's end-of-the-year photos and everybody, everything looks perfect. Everybody's got the same shirts and stuff on. And, you know, those kind of things can be easy for us to try to judge ourselves against other people and how their lives are going. And it just can reinforce that we're not doing it right. We're not doing enough. You know, I've had many clients over the years tell me that every time they have a minute to themselves, they feel guilty. That they're not giving that time to someone else. They need to be giving and doing more for others. So I think that that is one of the main drivers, is just not feeling like you're enough, that you're giving enough, that you're behind in some way. And I think that because of that, we're constantly pushing and running and our brains are constantly judging ourselves. And so that just immediately makes it impossible to feel comfortable to have time and space for yourself when you constantly feel like you're not enough of a— doing as good of a job as a wife or a partner or a mother or a business owner or friend or whatever it might be. That when your brain's like that, having those kind of conversations all the time, there's no room in there for yourself. Yeah.

Comparison, you know, comparison is the killer of everything really, isn't it? And, you know, it sounds like it's a bit of a, you know, double-edged sword. Either we're feeling guilt and shame that we're not doing enough, we're not perfect enough, we're not giving enough. And then on the other side, do you find that if your clients come back to you and say, well, I fell off the track, or yeah, I couldn't do any self-care this week, or then they then go into the guilt and shame of not caring for themselves? It seems like there's a sharp end on either— a sharp side on either end.

Absolutely. I mean, it's so— it's a perpetual, right? So, uh, I get started, a client gets started, and then they say, I fell off the wagon again, I'm not doing it right, I'm not enough, you know, I'm not perfect at this. And so it's just this perpetual cycle. And it might, you know, look different as it moves around the cycle, but it's just that same kind of feeling inside that we're— that we're— that there's some shame and we're just not perfect enough or we're not good enough. I think it's really easy to kind of keep that rolling inside.

So to finish off today, what's one small thing you would like a woman to know now that she is enough? Like, what is it you'd like to say to our audience?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, it sounds kind of trite for me to just put that out there, not speaking directly to a particular person and knowing their story. But here's the thing, you know, we— it's useful to be honest about who you are. And what you have accomplished. You know, like, again, lots of women are running companies or leading teams, or, you know, they have a child with special needs, or they made it through a difficult patch in their relationships. We all have these big accomplishments that we often forget about or we downplay. But if we're honest about the fact that we have accomplished these things, then we can start to hold ourselves in a little bit different light. And we don't have to stay in that pattern of not believing that we're enough or we're not, not doing it right. We just have to find the right information when it comes to self-care. You know, we want to make sure that whatever— see, the bottom line here is that we want to live a joyful life. I mean, to me, that's the only purpose for self-care. We want to be excited to wake up each day and get into whatever projects we're working with and be supportive of the people that we love. Um, we want to feel like we're contributing. We want to have— we have personal projects. We have, you know, a life that we want to live when, when, when folks don't need us quite as much and we can go out and do a lot of fun things on our own or with our partners. Like, that's the point of self-care. Making sure that we're actually clear about who we are and what we're trying to create for ourselves in our lives is really important. And it's nice to just Just give yourself that opportunity. Understand that you're worth that time to really clarify, pour out of your heart who you are now and what's important for yourself. Once you have that, it makes the day— you move through the day differently when you're clear about who you are and what you're up to.

Thank you for sharing them with our audience. And for anyone who just loved what Cara's been saying and knows that they need more self-care beyond the bubble, bath. We're talking about the proper exercise for you, the, the food for you, the way to approach your day basically, and your own way in the world. Cara's got it. Please, all her details will be in the show notes. Do reach out. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.